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Just before Eli Bell heads out into the blackness, where the cold waves rise to greet him and the winds are probably howling, the words of his commander go through his head: “Remember, this isn’t supposed to be fun.”

Bell always needs the reminder.

Many, if not all, of the rescue swimmers such as Bell can’t help themselves. They all believe rescues are fun. Sure, they’re unnerving, even scary at times, because no rescue is the same. But they’re still fun.

They’re the reason swimmers such as Bell go through all the grueling training. The rescues are game day in the NFL, a big-city marathon to a distance runner or the NCAA tournament to a college basketball player.

They are the payoff.

Still, Bell reminds himself not to show the fun in his face as he swims through those crashing waves and approaches the people he’s charged to save.

“You have to keep in mind,” Bell’s supervisor told him once, “that this is the worst day of these people’s lives.”

The fact that Bell would have to tell himself that at all says something about his love for the water. It almost seems funny he made it into a career. That love wasn’t always there.

Bell was talented. He had a swimmer’s body, a tall, lean frame with big hands and feet, and that was enough to keep him on elite swim teams and get him to state when he swam for Greeley West. But he admits he didn’t take it seriously for a long time.

Bell, in fact, didn’t like competitive swimming at all at first. When he was 6, his parents, Gail and Scott, put him on the Hillside Pool swim team. The team holds meets throughout the summer and hour-long practice sessions in the mornings.

Bell didn’t like it, Gail noted with amusement. Swimming was for splashing around. It wasn’t supposed to be work.

He stuck with it, though, maybe just because his older brother, Levi, swam.

When he joined Greeley West, he made state his first two years but he glided through practices, he said, and he didn’t attend the optional morning workouts.

By the start of his junior year, he noticed all his friends were in the “fast” group. He realized if he wanted to get there, he had to work hard.

He did and that year he finished second at state in the 200-yard freestyle. His senior year, he won two state titles, in the 200-yard freestyle and in relays.

Two cool stories came out of that state meet his senior year in 2005.

The first was Bell beat the state champion in the 200, a long-time rival, by a huge margin — three seconds — to earn his individual state title.

The second, the one the media jumped on, was Bell won the relay title with three other guys who all swam together when they were kids at Hillside.

The University of Wyoming signed Bell to a scholarship. Perhaps that was the third cool story.

Maybe. Bell didn’t want to go college, but he realized it was a good opportunity. He attended from 2005-09 and graduated with a degree in geography.

Swimming, again, became a job. A Division I scholarship isn’t easy to earn, and in some ways it’s harder to keep.

“It was hard,” Bell said. “It was like a job. I got burned out a bit.”

As it turns out, he didn’t like geography and, after working odd jobs in retail, he decided he needed to figure out his life.

He liked being outside, skiing, hiking and camping. He decided to go into search and rescue and joined the Coast Guard in August 2010.

Right away, the workouts were harder than college and most were on land. Bell pushed himself through 8-mile runs, hill sprints and burpees at 6:30 a.m., and with those big hands and feet and lean body, he felt like a fish out of water.

His workouts in the pool were the only time he got his rest because he was faster than anyone else.

“My mentor was motivated and didn’t want us to fail, which was good,” Bell said, “but it also sucked.”

Bell spent six months at airmen school. It was supposed to be an 18-week course but Bell failed the first time. He did well but couldn’t figure out how to break a choke hold to prevent someone from drowning, a needed skill when you’re rescuing panicked survivors (knocking him out wasn’t an option, though Bell learned later it is in a real-life situation).

“They do all kinds of things to you to simulate what you may face,” Bell said. “They hold you underwater, rip your mask off and swim away from you when you reach them. It’s all hard.”

He did pass the second time through and, after more training, he began his career in April as a rescue swimmer in Kodiak, Alaska (Bell picked that spot, and it’s hard to blame him).

So far he’s had three recovery missions, meaning he swam through choppy, even scary water to rescue people, and almost a dozen search-and-rescue missions. Those can mean anything from a report of a flare to lost hunters to a plane crash.

Bell draws on his swimming career a lot, though it is different. Alaska is cold, and so is its water, so he’ll wear three layers under a dry suit and 60 pounds of equipment, a third of his weight.

Most rescue swimmers last a decade, and that’s what he hopes for so far. There are a little more than 300 swimmers in the entire Coast Guard. Promotions are thin. But it’s a fun job.

He can call the rescues fun because he hasn’t yet faced a tragedy. He’s rescued a couple anglers, and it could have been bad, only they were wearing thick, padded suits, so-called “Gumby” suits that saved them.

“That’s what it boils down to in any survival situation,” Bell said. “It’s preparation.”

It took him a while to realize it, but Bell now knows that practice equals preparation, and preparation equals success.